This is the 37th Annual Show of artwork from Connecticut’s prisons. The Annual Show features 797 artworks from 138 inmates in 12 prisons. Inmates and staff work all year toward this unique and extraordinary community event.

The Prison Arts Program is a collaboration with the CT Department of Correction initiated in 1978 and is a program of Community Partners in Action, a non-profit agency created in 1875.
This is the third and final time the John Slade Ely House will host the Annual Show before closing the building to become a granting organization for fine arts in New Haven. This is an amazing place to see the show.

THE PRISON ARTS PROGRAM? WHY? Makes prisons safer for correction officers, staff and inmates. Reduces idle time. Improves self-discipline. Provides substantial, self-generated and self-sustaining reasons for inmates to maintain their discipline. Improves social skills and respect for others. Develops empathy, the opposite of criminality. Develops self-respect, self-esteem, accountability and dignity. Enables positive contribution to the community. Encourages rigorous long term endeavors. Develops work ethic and communication skills. Encourages inmates to take themselves and their situation seriously. Gives purpose. Connects inmates with their families, especially parents with their children. Generates valuable health/behavior education materials for use in the prison and in the outside community. Positively and constructively changes the inner life of the inmate, the environment of the prison and the outside world. Reduces recidivism. Reduces crime. Saves money. Results in unique, fascinating, thoughtful, amazing and unexpected works of art.

ANNOUNCING THE ANNUAL GREATER NEW HAVEN AREA
HIGH SCHOOL ART EXHIBITION & ELIZABETH GREELEY PORTFOLIO COMPETITION

April 22- May 3, 2015

Reception: Sunday May 3, 2-4pm. Awards ceremony at 3pm.

ATTENTION: High School Art Teachers in Southern New Haven County (includes schools, public and private, in New Haven, Hamden, East Haven, West Haven, North Haven, Branford, Cheshire, North Branford, Woodbridge, Guilford, Milford, Madison and Wallingford)

Thank you for participating in Canvases for Cancer--Research, an exhibition/fundraiser to support cancer research that will be presented at John Slade Ely House. This project is the brain child of Katro Storm, artist and member of the Visual Arts Advisory Group (VAAG) of the Arts Council.

The John Slade Ely House is happy to announce the 2014 Exhibition of Undergraduate College Artwork in Connecticut which runs from November 23 through December 21. Participating students are enrolled in colleges public and private in the state of Connecticut. A variety of media are represented including photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, mixed media, and installation. The biennial exhibition hopes to provide students an introduction to the practice of exhibiting and engaging audiences for their artwork. A Public Reception will be held on Sunday, December 7th from 2-5pm and is free and open to the public.

Brazil’s ambiguous relationship with Western Europe often assumes the form of a problematic quest for authenticity in a culture plagued by a feeling of double exoticism, foreign in Europe and yet not entirely native in America. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda opens Roots of Brazil claiming Brazilians to be “exiles in our own land” and 50 years later Roberto Schwartz speaks of a Brazilian sense of harboring “misplaced ideas.” Aren’t we all at least a bit exiled and our ideas at least a bit displaced? Brazilian culture is traversed with this keen sense of displacement.
The Brazilian artists featured in this exhibit work under the pressure of being at once beneficiaries and victims of the particular culture into which they happen to have been born.

Doll-Like brings together artists working across disciplines and media who integrate ideas pertaining to dolls into their artwork. Puppets, marionettes, figurines, action figures and even living dolls are substitutes for our self, offering a vehicle to communicate and examine ideas about play, therapy, magic, ritual, spirituality, memory, scale, empathy, identity, gender and notions of beauty and idealized form. Subverting traditional ideas that we associate with this familiar emblem of our individual and collective humanness, this show aims to challenge our preconceptions and stereotypes.

John Slade Ely House launches its 2014 exhibition schedule with Cityscapes an exhibition of painting, drawing, and mixed media works by artists who document their environment. Participating artists are Michael Angelis, Jeff Konigsberg, and J.D. Richey. There will be a public reception for the artists on Sunday, February 2, from 2-5pm.

Michael Angelis and J.D. Richey find interesting points of view of the city in the course of daily life. Both either residing or working in New Haven they include plein air painting as part of their art making practice. Documenting a city under development and renewal they record the juxtaposition of highway construction, city, state, and federal buildings, churches, and residential buildings that intersect and layer in our visual space.

In his “Drawings For Manhattan/City States” series Jeff Konigsberg draws and paints over digital prints of Manhattan. Some views in the work being aerial, others ground level, he envisions a city in the post Sandy hurricane period. His is an apprehensive view of the city, walled in with concrete, attempting to forestall the approaching destructive forces of nature.

November 17- January 19, 2014

Digital Ground

Holiday Hours:

Regular hours through Sunday December 22.

Open Saturday and Sunday December 28 and 29, 2-5pm

Reopen Saturday January 4th

Catalina Barroso Luque Claudia Cron

Tom Hebert Ken Lovell Ken Morgan

Paulette Rosen Paul Theriault

Digital Ground is an exhibition that explores the potential of combining digitally produced material in conjunction with traditional art practices such as drawing, painting, and photography. Use of recycled or repurposed materials as well as first hand production are included in the artists creative processes. Works as varied as Paulette Rosen’s scanned and drawn upon images of birds to Catalina Barroso Luque’s projected photo collage installation to Paul Theriault’s looping digital video works offer a survey of the ways artists are incorporating new technology into their art practices.